At the delta of the Kobuk they bore southward, crossed Hotham Inlet, and following the Choris Peninsula to its southmost extremity, crossed the wind-swept ice of Eschscholtz Bay and camped that night at Kiwalik. The next day they made Candle, and it was there that Old Man Gordon found the vindication of his much scoffed theory. At Candle, they were thawing with steam! “I told ’em! I told ’em it would come!” cried the old man excitedly, as he fairly dragged the girl to the Candle Creek workings. “I told ’em in Dawson before the big rush, an’ I be’n tellin’ ’em on the Koyukuk ever since! An’ they wouldn’t believe me! An’ now ye can see fer yerself!” “But, they burn coal here, dad,” objected the girl. “Aye, they burn coal because they ain’t got the wood! An’ if it’s coal ye need, which it ain’t, there’s plenty coal on the Koyukuk, an’ better coal than this ice-clogged stuff they’re shovelin’ under their b’ilers, here.” For two whole days the girl was forced to remain in Candle while the old man haunted the workings, asking innumerable questions, and boasting to anyone who would listen that he, himself, was the father of “b’iler thawin’.” When at last Lou succeeded in persuading him to resume the journey, it was to find that the dog race had been entirely supplanted in his mind by the astounding fact that he had actually seen frozen gravel thawed with steam. “An’ they tell me they’re usin’ b’ilers at Nome, an’ pilin’ up dumps as big as mountains!” he burst forth as he paused on top of a great mountainous ridge, that overlooked Candle, “I’ll find out all about it, an’ when we go back I’ll fill the valley of Myrtle from rim to rim, an’ I’ll reckon’ my gold by the pound!” Lou answered nothing as the outfit fairly flew over the hard trail but as she ran beside the dogs, she smiled. Here, possibly was the solution of her difficulty. She would encourage the old man to devote all his time to the study of boilers on the chance that he would entirely forget the dog race. Foolish hope, as she was soon to realize. Because, for weeks before the great event Nome talks nothing but dogs, and the Alaska Sweepstakes.